After making it to Haines we had one little sunny window. We flew out with [Fly] Drake trying to get a spot lined up for him to drop us off. But the weather came in and we were grounded for the next few weeks. We didn’t have anything to do and we’re sitting in the health food store in Haines and Ryland [Bell] comes up to us. He thought we looked super bummed, so told us he’d come over later. He came over and showed us a zone. He felt so bad for us for biking all the way up there and having our glacier camping plans shut down, so he tipped us to this mining hut we could potentially find. We still didn’t know exactly how to find it, but there was a one-day weather window coming. We saddled up and started skinning up the snowmobile trail in shitty weather. After the approach we found this weird mining shack. It was locked, but we broke in. There were quite a few mice, so we might’ve got hantavirus, but all good. The next day, when it was still super cold about 5 a.m., we split up under this big cornice to get up. It had just snowed two feet, so we were trudging through all this pow, even though it was late in the season. I dropped first and after going through all that to get up there I was so fired up. I took the first two real turns since getting to Alaska, and as soon as I took that second turn, I just felt it. All the fresh snow, two feet of it, was bomber and I knew I didn’t even have to look back. It was such a tease, man. That’s the thing with mountains. It’s addicting and once you push yourself a little bit, it’s so exhilarating. With snowboard-ing you get a certain high from dealing with problems in the mountains that rely on your actual fundamentals of snowboard-ing. Even those first two hop turns above that double rappel in Argentina were crazy, but so mellow in terms of the snowboard-ing. It’s cool to get the type of adrenaline you would from a back 10 from a completely different side of snowboarding. Tell me a little about your latest project with Iñaki Odriozola, Inyo and Worm’s Adventures . I met Iñaki on the spring camp mission with Jones. After that trip neither of us really had anywhere to stay, so we were bum-ming it in Mammoth, sleeping in our trucks in the parking lots of condo complexes, sneaking into hot tubs and showers. We had a fun time that summer and were both fired up on doing a splitboard project that wasn’t going to be super granola-y. Most of the time you see splitboarding filmed super far away and it’s pretty basic snowboarding. We wanted to do a freestyle split-board project and see if we could do the snowboarding that’s just as sick as it is with snowmobiling but to have it be foot-powered. Inyo is the one other guy that I know that is down to do a little bit of everything. There’s not many people that I’ve hung out with that are down to go build a snow cave and shoot silly GoPro shots and make a YouTube video. 052 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4: Page 52
